I'm back in the land of the robots now I've mostly finished
redecorating my house. Android
9 is underway again and there should be regular updates
on my website including some more this week. The legs have
their motors attached so it's on with the body which will
hold all the electronics.

I'll be coming back to attached
the sideways-leaning motors once I know how far it will have
to lean to stand on one leg, it's kind of hard to tell at
the moment but once I get a feel for how tall it is and how
the arms will look it will be easier to find the right place
for the extra hip motors. It's going to end up over 1m / 3ft
tall by the looks of it...

A few people have asked me if there will more updates on my website soon as I
haven't posted as much as I have done previously. So I've
started a blog which I'll update every few days with robot
things (mainly my thought process etc) as I have a few other
things going on in the background at the moment: XRobots Blog

I have ordered the parts for the new android. All of it so
far has come from an educational website that supplies
schools, but also the general public. They are located in
the UK and have some very reasonable prices. Check out: www.mutr.co.uk.

I'll be using mainly balsa wood for this biped but I'm
still aiming to make the legs about 50cm long so the whole
thing comes to about 90/100cm (approx 3ft) tall. It will use
some
of the
high
torque linear actuators although I haven't seen them in
real life yet so I've no idea if they're up to it. The plan
is to move the leg joints as little as possible for walking
in order to 'gear down' the actuators and increase power
through levering.

I may still use aluminium tube for some of it but the main
concept will be a balsa box construction with heavy card
glued on with PVA to make the structure rigid. Anything that
needs extra strength will be reinforced with 0.5mm aluminium
sheet. All the joints will be made from 3mm steel rod
rotating inside polythene
bushes so I'm hoping that the whole construction will be
light but relatively strong.

I'll start a new article on my site and start posting pics
as soon as I get the items delivered...

I'm currently is the process of refitting my kitchen and
bathroom... and then redecorating the whole house from
concrete floors up. So not much time for updating my
projects, however, my plans for the new year are:

Finishing the last part of Mr
stick legs's actual legs which involves another two
wiper motors (now makes 5 it total for everything) and some
bycycle brake
cords to help him stand on one foot. Part of it is done but
the page is not yet updated. I'll also post another video
when it's done and walking. For now the linux mini-itx
system is not on-board and I've not worked on the arms any more.

I'm thinking about building another biped exactly the same
but only about 3ft tall instead of 5/6 as the others have
been. This will be made from tubular aluminium, some plastic
parts from DIY stores as well as polymorph prototyping
plastic and use cheaper plastic gearboxes. I've pretty much
reaslised that as well as wiper motors being super strong
for robots they are also heavy, this means that the android
structure has to be stronger (and heavier) and so it's just
a vicious circle of power-weight-actuators-power-weight...

There's a rumor about the RoboSapien v3 will be around 3ft
tall and be available in 2007 so it seems like a reaslisitc
target to work towards for a hobby robot. I'd also like to
get further with building arms/head next time before
starting at legs again so I think smaller is better.

I have launched a new website www.music-chat.com,
despite it's non-robotic name it will infact be dedicated to
musical communication for robots. Think about ringtones /
'Windows desktop' sounds etc. It's mainly coming from the
idea of robots interacting with society. I'll be including
projects along the lines of:

-The creation of sound schemes for Robots.
-Projects to play the sounds on any robot, whether it has a
PC based computer in it or not.
-Speech synthesis and also projects to put expression into
robotic speech.
-Robots that play instruments, 'sing' or perform in some
way.
-Various related robotic musical industry news.

I will be creating some sounds using various
synths and
musical equipment as one of my other interests is composing
music. I play drums, bass, keyboards, guitar and own a
clarinet as well as various software and hardware
synthesisers. Anything created here will be 'open source' in
that it will be free to download and will not be
copyrighted, anyone who wishes to contribute will be welcome
to do so.

There's not much content yet but I'll be adding some
things over the next few days / weeks and forever... you can
always sign up and post 'hello' in the forums if you like,
or suggest any project you'd like to see along these lines
and I'll build it...! (maybe)

In other news, I'll be updating
XRobots.co.uk with
some more things this week. Still posting news at 914pcbots.com for the
rest of this month - Anyone remember the Tomy Omnibot?

I've pretty much got the computer operating inside and
controlling Mr Stick Legs. I have to just write a bit more
code to send the output from my basic vision application
over IP back to the android to control it... There'll be
some more on the site soon about linking the whole thing
together, then it'll just be a case of programming as most
of the hardware construction is done. I'll post some more
videos when it's all together.

In other news, I'm looking after 914pcbots.com for the month of November while Tim is away.

So, I'll be posting some news and items to hopfuly start
discussions shortly. Any suggestions - let me know, the site
is about general PC based robots as well as the White Box Robotics 914.